Renewable sources of hydrocarbons are increasing in importance. With renewable resources, the dependence on imported oil for petroleum based products is reduced and a substitute for imported oil is provided. Equally important, is the recycling and reprocessing of used petroleum based products, such as waste lubricating oils, or oil derived from carbonaceous waste. There is a tremendous amount of oil that is discarded each year, and reprocessing, or rerefining, can recover a substantial amount of product from spent lubricants and other carbonaceous waste materials. Recovery and reprocessing of contaminated hydrocarbons also reduces that amount of material that needs to be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner.
The United States produces over 2.4 billion gallons of finished lubricants each year. From the lubricants produced, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates over 1.4 billion gallons of spent lubricating oils are generated. From the spent oils, either low grade fuels and re-refined base oils can be produced. There is an increasing demand for reducing waste, and recycling of waste products, and there is an increased demand for technology to address this issue. This includes the development of technology to process and recover usable lubricants, solvents, and energy related products from alternate sources of materials for hydrocarbon based products.
To meet demands of the lubricants market, the petroleum industry has made greater use of high severity hydroprocessing. Improvements are needed to produce highly saturated, hetero-atom free oils that can be used as either finished or intermediate products, such as lube oil blending stocks, petrochemical feedstocks, specialty oils and liquid transportation fuels. Also, technology that is used for re-refining waste lubricating oils often needs improvements to adapt to changing feedstocks that include non-traditional sources of hydrocarbons.
Improvements can reduce the amount of undesirable byproducts requiring treatment, increase the amount of hydrocarbons recovered for processing, and improve the quality of the recovered products.